Define casuals, define ruin and define WoW, through your own experience, which will bring a new set of questions.

Casuals- no doubt have changed the game and how it is played. However I would argue that even the most elitist of theory-crafters still enjoys exploiting the path of least resistance. Does getting more for less actually harm the overall quality of the game and experience? This relates to 'ruin.'

Ruin- do the changes we see in the game-play somehow break our traditional views of how the game should be played? Or similarly, just to coin the term, does "casual style" of game-play degrade the experience and fun of the game, for both others and themselves? This relates to the game as a whole.

WoW- what elements of the game have been put at risk? What specific goals, expectations and accomplishments, of the game, and formerly present, that are no longer being met? This relates back to how casual style has changed the game.

Given, Casual-style=more for less.
Okay, so does having more for less actually harm my willingness to play? No.
Do I value LFR and items associated to a casual nature more than my current game-play? No.
Therefore I am no longer getting more for less.
Therefore because the casual-style undermines the value obtained from the game, any accomplishment made outside of the casual style is inefficient and a virtual waste of time.

Does that ruin a game? No, it changes the game to where your active members of the community are embittered for being treated poorly.

Making things more difficult & having people put in more work into it they will mostly stay longer & they will not leave as fast as they do now a days.

I'm sure you find it comforting to believe that.

"There is a pervasive myth that making content hard will induce players to rise to the occasion. We find the opposite. " -- Ghostcrawler
"Almost every time I have gotten to know a critic personally, they keep up with the criticism but lose the venom." -- Ghostcrawler
"Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must first be overcome." -- Samuel Johnson

http://users.telenet.be/mmodata/Charts/TotalSubs.png
You clearly see that starting from 2009, the total number of sub-based MMOs plateaus at ~22M before declining. In marketing terms, that means the market is saturated. When a market is saturated, you can only attract new players from other games. Also, you need to reduce the churn, which was huge in BC (the devs discussed that back in the days). So, you can no longer afford a lot of players leaving before lvl 10 like it used to be the case. Fact.

That makes no sense. That trend is going to track WoW's trend closely because WoW is like half that total. All it says is that the total number of players is declining because WoW is declining. As for market saturation, that makes no sense either. The number of gamers keeps growing, and while WoW is an MMO, it's also just a game. Moreover, it's also just a form of entertainment. In fact, the strength of WoW was that it could attract players that were not gamers at all because it had such strong word of mouth. Today it's the opposite, very few people would recommend WoW and it's more like "oh, I heard of that, is that thing still alive?"

And how, pray, does Blizzard "cater" to the casuals, theres ton of content for them, bu there have been 3 raids this exp: with 16, 13 and 14 bosses, The heroic bosses while not lasting longer (in weeks) lasted A LOT MORE in "pulls" (there was a post calling it the historical highest). You have challenge modes, you have heroic raids with heroic only bosses, you have the (in the higher tiers) very casual unfriendly brawler's guild

Sure there is content for the casual... lfr? there aren't even new 5 man dungeons... While i agree with what you say i fail to see how blizzard doesn't abide by the rules you laid out

There should be exclusive content that casuals can never see unless they convert to hardcore players, pretty much the BC formula. As I said, I was pretty much always a casual, but I wanted to convert to a "hardcore" player to see the content, even though I actually never converted. At the moment there is zero point to being a top player when most players see everything.

Same with me, its just there were so many people complaining they were hard, while they actually weren't just needed to CC certain mobs.

The problem with Cata heroics is that they had so many mechanics that if one person screwed up the group wiped in essence they challenged the weakest member of the group. It did not matter if you had four great players if the other one could not complete mechanics you were going to wipe contrast this with Wrath where the dungeons challenged the strongest players. In a dungeon such as the Halls of Reflection, which was quite difficult until players had out geared it, if one person failed at the mechanics the remaining players were able to use their skill to get through the encounter.

The problem with Cata heroics is that they had so many mechanics that if one person screwed up the group wiped in essence they challenged the weakest member of the group. It did not matter if you had four great players if the other one could not complete mechanics you were going to wipe contrast this with Wrath where the dungeons challenged the strongest players. In a dungeon such as the Halls of Reflection, which was quite difficult until players had out geared it, if one person failed at the mechanics the remaining players were able to use their skill to get through the encounter.

I think people misinterpret "casual" to mean "bad player" when that's not true at all. A better description would be: varying skill levels of players that play when time permits.

I think that I'm a pretty good player and have been playing since September 2005. I used to raid a lot back then when I was a teenager fresh out of High School with no worries in the world but I just don't have time for that anymore. That doesn't make me a bad player. That simply makes me a player that plays less than before.

I have gotten much better over the years even though I no longer participate in organized raids. Yes, I'm an LFR Raider. I complete anywhere from 0-4 wings per week. Sometimes I don't have enough time and sometimes I just don't feel like playing. Besides work and school, I also like to play other games that require a time investment.

I guess you could call me a casual but does anything of this make me a bad player? No, not at all. I don't feel casuals are ruining the game.

So, players did not find it fun to spend half an hour in a queue only to find that no matter how well they played they could not complete the dungeon if just one person did not know what to do and those that had not run the instance before bore the brunt of other players' frustration when they messed up.

Quite frankly it was a bad design in TBC and inexcusable in Cata after the popularity and accessibility of heroics in Wrath.

They're making just as entitled an argument as any other group of players might be (lets pretend for a moment that the playerbase is so easily fragmented into player types). The humorous tidbit here is that a) most casual-centric requests would serve to decrease sub stability (by effectively making content consumable at a faster rate), and b) Blizzard has been listening and making efforts towards said casual playerbase, and it's still not working out in their business interests.

A) Content consumed fast for you is probably content at about the right pacing for actual casuals. Casuals who say dont commit a whole lot of time to the game or can't for whatever reason.
B) Blizzard has made some efforts but they've been half hearted and have largely been concerned with maintaining the hardcore play style in the face of mounting economic pressure to entertain the mass of players who are lvl max cap and don't give a fuck about HM and increasingly now Normal Raiding. In fact I would argue they really don't give a fuck about raiding they just want to progress their characters and all the "casual" content or most of it at any rate doesn't do that.

- - - Updated - - -

Originally Posted by Himora

Casuals are keeping the game alive... Bad clueless dev's are killing it. the fight between good and evil.

Ironically Yes. To be frank I'm AMAZED they've retained as many casual players as they have considering they keep giving them the finger at every opportunity.

The hammer comes down:

Originally Posted by Osmeric

Normal should be reduced in difficulty. Heroic should be reduced in difficulty.
And the tiny fraction for whom heroic raids are currently well tuned? Too bad,so sad! With the arterial bleed of subs the fastest it's ever been, the vanity development that gives you guys your own content is no longer supportable.

So, players did not find it fun to spend half an hour in a queue only to find that no matter how well they played they could not complete the dungeon if just one person did not know what to do and those that had not run the instance before bore the brunt of other players' frustration when they messed up.

Quite frankly it was a bad design in TBC and inexcusable in Cata after the popularity and accessibility of heroics in Wrath.

It shows the impact that just a minority can have on the majority. Casual != bad, but stick one bad in a group of the majority and the ship sinks.

Though I do remember a number of WotLK heroics failing due to one player even at launch. There was still complaints of multi-hour heroic runs, tedious mechanics, and one shot mechanics. A lot of players hitting the ICC heroics already out geared the place allowing caring to happen in the first place. I have seen ICC five man groups wipe due to losing a dps and not having enough output to complete the event. WotLK heroics was not the only place that players got carried. I have had a number of groups where players do end up caring that one person prenerf. Now some fights involved the entire group to be involve in a mechanic like that beam one which after you learn it isnt that hard and was rarely an issue in most of my groups. That boss had a wide enough DPS wiggle room to allow players to focus more on the debuff.

Cata heroics was far from BC heroics. The closest you get is having to do GB with a completely failed bombing run and then you would have something that compared to BC heroics which PuGs did all the time. What is a bad design is making DPS the hide in the corner roll for those who dont want any sort of responsibility to making the tank manage all the mechanics and then expecting these players to assume responsibility and ask them to side step into a beam for a few seconds. I do not understand the mentality of those who do not want to work together as a team and yet do team oriented group based content.

Heroics did not suddenly become popular in WotLK as they was already very popular in BC and had a lot of players of all types participating in them. The next big boost to heroics did not hit until LFD came in which made them a far faster to gear out and burn out form of content which created big problems in Cata which lacked content compared to when LFD launched on top of a years worth of content that many out geared.

Heroics did not suddenly become popular in WotLK as they was already very popular in BC and had a lot of players of all types participating in them. The next big boost to heroics did not hit until LFD came in which made them a far faster to gear out and burn out form of content which created big problems in Cata which lacked content compared to when LFD launched on top of a years worth of content that many out geared.

This is simple untrue. Wotlk popularized heroics in large part because you could buy lots of different gear from them now and because people were finally starting to hit max level with more regularity then they did in BC. In fact the developers said somewhere that the heroics in BC had very little participation as well.

TBC added them as an alternative form of max lvl content but most players weren't even hitting max level anyway or getting the keys to do them (especially when they required revered). They were not seriously fit for mass consumption until LFD. The "lack of content problem" you describe was actually not a problem for casual players. It was for so called hardcore casuals who played for 20+ hours a week. For actual casual players Cataclysm was fine (difficulty concerns aside).

Last edited by Glorious Leader; 2013-09-07 at 09:24 PM.

The hammer comes down:

Originally Posted by Osmeric

Normal should be reduced in difficulty. Heroic should be reduced in difficulty.
And the tiny fraction for whom heroic raids are currently well tuned? Too bad,so sad! With the arterial bleed of subs the fastest it's ever been, the vanity development that gives you guys your own content is no longer supportable.

Reactions such as: Removing exclusivity from raiding and pvp gearing. Spending time and resources on things like daily quests and pokemon over raid content. Homogenizing, simplifying, and just down right retarded class changes.

"Gamer" is not a bad word. I identify as a gamer. When calling out those who persecute and harass, the word you're looking for is "asshole." @_DonAdams

When you see someone in a thread making the same canned responses over and over, click their name, click view forum posts, and see if they are a troll. Then don't feed them.

I think it's funny when people assume or bring up the topic "Do you think casuals ruined the game?". I've been playing sicne the beginning and there have been casuals since day 1. Most of the player base is casual. Without the casuals this population of this game would be hardly anything.

So, players did not find it fun to spend half an hour in a queue only to find that no matter how well they played they could not complete the dungeon if just one person did not know what to do and those that had not run the instance before bore the brunt of other players' frustration when they messed up.

That's why LFD is such a big mistake (or at least using it for every dungeon). You can't expect an LFD group to be able to tackle anything but trivial content successfully. Which means all 5 man content must be trivial junk. WoW lost a lot of depth due to that. Back in vanilla I ran 5-mans exclusively and had a great time (I was an actual "casual"), but that's not going to happen with LFD.

Quite frankly it was a bad design in TBC and inexcusable in Cata after the popularity and accessibility of heroics in Wrath.

There was nothing wrong with it in TBC. Heroics were the top tier casual content (along with Kara/ZA if you wanted to raid), it was not supposed to be something you can mindlessly zerg through with 5 randoms. And Cata heroics had nothing on TBC. The class abilities have grown incredibly since then. In Cata every class had strong AoE (dps, heal, threat) and a bunch of survivability abilities. In TBC only paladins had AoE tanking etc.